Have you noticed an uptick in F1 discussions on your Twitterfeed recently? Stugotz certainly has and he’s not happy about it.
Formula One racing has indeed finally broken through in the American public consciousness in recent years. It was just announced that F1 will stage a grand prize in Las Vegas next year, a signal that they see the U.S. as a growth market, especially since they already have two other races scheduled in America this year (Miami and Austin).
Netflix’s Drive to Survive series has been a great entry point for American audiences, ESPN just celebrated its most-watched F1 season ever, the U.S. broadcasting rights could be a real battle in the near future, and star drivers like Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen are now well-known on this side of the pond. Even NFL stars like J.J. Watt have been sucked in.
Didn’t know a single thing about F1 Racing besides Lewis Hamilton like a month ago.
Now I’m just wondering which is greater, Christian Horner’s love for Max Verstappen or his hate for Toto Wolff.
I’m also down a deep rabbit hole on the 2022 car and the downforce implications.
— JJ Watt (@JJWatt) July 26, 2021
So it’s actually not that surprising to open up your Twitterfeed at random times of the day (or night) and find that a significant portion of your followers decided to stay up late to watch a Formula One race across the globe.
My sleep tracking app yelled at me this morning for going to bed at 3am and I feel hung over even though I haven’t had an alcoholic beverage in like a week but staying up for the F1 race was worth it to find out which of the rest of you are the same kind of little freak I am
— Amanda Mull (@amandamull) April 10, 2022
Everyone on Twitter when I mention potentially staying up all night to watch F1: pic.twitter.com/iyGJCfKIB1
— Alanis King (@alanisnking) April 10, 2022
Of course, not every American sports fan cares. In fact, most probably still don’t. It all feels a little akin to the early days of American interest in European soccer. At the time, we had to sit through a lot of rants from out-of-touch sports radio hosts about why they don’t care about soccer and neither should you. Now look at us.
All of which brings up to Monday’s edition of the Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, in which the co-host went on a rant about how sick he is of hearing about F1 and how “no one” actually likes it.
https://twitter.com/LeBatardShow/status/1513531548825534469
“Enough,” said Stugotz. “Every Sunday morning, including J.J. Watt, by the way, everyone is an F1 fan. And everyone’s tweeting about it. And it’s nonstop. And I’m getting these alerts and I don’t care about F1. And no one else really cares that much about F1. It’s become the cool thing to tweet about on social media on Sunday mornings.
“Do me a favor, stop tweeting about it. Do me a favor, I’m trying to watch Jane Pauley. Do not interrupt me when I am trying to watch Jane Pauley on a Sunday morning.
“All of a sudden, everyone’s an F1 fan? Since when? We’ve never discussed F1 on this show til Smetty (Jessica Smetana) came here. And I am upset about this because it is ruining every Sunday morning that I have.”
Look, far be it from anyone to stop people from enjoying the simple pleasures of listening to Jane Pauley explain the state of our modern world on a cozy Sunday. But this F1 fandom racecar has left the pit and it’s slipstreaming its way up the American sports fan radar.
In the meantime, it sounds like one of the worst things anyone could do is to tweet directly at Stugotz on Sunday mornings letting him know what’s happening in the world of F1. That would be extremely mean and rude. He explicitly asked everyone not to do that. So we would never suggest that people tweet at him directly on Sunday mornings with all the latest F1 news. We wouldn’t even want to put that suggestion in anyone’s head…
